Steerpike’s Games of 2013: Silent Night

The American holiday of Thanksgiving marks the start of shopping and gluttony, and also the Hollywood Oscar Season, when movies considered “Oscar-worthy” are released in theatres. The thinking is it keeps important films fresh in the minds of the nominating committee, whereas something that came out last spring is easily forgotten. The same happens with gaming, for different reasons, yet this year’s holiday was a very quiet time. Practically nothing of interest happened.

No, not even that.

All in all 2013 has been a strange, thin year, with only a few real standouts from the AAA crowd and an avalanche of worthy stuff in the independent realm. 2013 also saw consoles advance a generation – the first time this has happened in nearly a decade – and, of course, the re-eruption of the PC as a gaming platform. The strange dichotomy is that 2013 has been simultaneously one of the dullest and most interesting years in gaming history, and speaking personally I’ve struggled on that account. I have struggled both to fill this list at all, and to keep it to our traditional five(ish). This is a year of Honorable Mentions, missed boats, and general confusion. And I’ll hazard this prognostication: much of what we saw in 2013 is probably the norm from now on.

On to the games!

The One that Wasn’t There

The First Hour of Bioshock Infinite

One of the most anticipated games of 2013 is actually two games. There’s the first hour of Bioshock Infinite, for which this award is intended because it’s head-explodingly fantastic: a breathtaking opus of visual beauty and unforgiving intellectualism that decays like an unstable particle, unable to maintain itself. The other 22 hours are a pedestrian and forgettable shooter. Not bad, at least, not really bad, but hardly special and special was what we wanted, what we expected, what that first hour promised. Special’s exactly what we didn’t get, because of Bioshock Infinite’s tragic over-stuffedness.

In one of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, a writer is cursed with infinite ideas. They just spout out of him, relentlessly, without room to process. It drives him mad. Eventually he’s torn open his fingertips and is frantically writing, in blood, on pavement, trying to get just a few ideas down before they’re replaced with new ones. It’s the best allusion I can think of for Bioshock Infinite. There’s too much and never time to absorb. Did Ken Levine think he was dying or something, and had to get all his ideas into one last game or lose them forever?

There’s the first hour, and there’s cities and there’s ghosts and there’s racism and what’s this with the robot men and hey a carnival and whoa we’re in another world and why is that George Washington mannequin shooting at me and look Songbird I remember him from press packet and yowza it’s Custer’s last stand and bitch quit throwing books at me and run the statue’s collapsing and where’d they get an ocean in the sky and how did she learn to talk if she never had human contact and damn but that corset looks uncomfortable and what the fuck we’re in Rapture again and ROLL CREDITS. It was infinite, but a better title would have been Bioshock ad Nauseam. The first hour is diamond, and I can never enjoy it again, because I know what comes after.

The One I Didn’t Expect

Tomb Raider

On and off I’ve been working on a review of Tomb Raider, with a video and everything, and Dix covered the key points in his own Games of 2013 post, so there’s little I need to say here. The 2013 reboot’s promotional stuff glorified violence against a woman under the guise of making her tough and empowered, which seemed very blame-the-victim to me. And though the brutality of Lara Croft’s hellish ordeal is more front and center – and more gleeful – than strictly necessary, I admit it does function in context. Gender aside, the privileged, naïve young innocent must endure the unspeakable if we are to accept her transformation. Over the course of the game she awakens something in herself: a primitive, bloodthirsty, survival-driven creature that once loosed cannot be locked away again. By the end she’s come to terms with it, even embraced it. This is what Far Cry 3 failed to do, and part of the reason it doesn’t deliver while Tomb Raider does.

Visually astonishing, mechanically fluid, rip-roaringly fun to play and ending exactly when it’s time to end, Tomb Raider is the definition of a great game. When the worst anybody can say about it is “there aren’t enough tombs to raid” (this is true, it’s a very tomb-deficient game), you know you’ve got a winner. They crammed so much good into Tomb Raider that at times I feared I’d lose track – that the controls would get too much or what have you, as I juggled stealth, platforming, combat, exploration, and upgrades. But it never happened, and the game’s luscious open world never really fell short in offering challenges to face. Not an easy game to master, and maybe a bit too Uncharted for the purists, but it’s exactly what the franchise needed.

Tomb Raider sold “poorly” because it was poorly budgeted and poorly managed. It was too expensive to make and though its numbers were pretty good, it never had a prayer of recouping its massive budget (something any analyst could have told them). After the fiasco of The Angel of Darkness, only world-blind publisher executives would look at Tomb Raider and see “blockbuster.” It needed what it got, a hard reset, but it could have been precisely the same game at half the price if they’d just focused the project made wiser technical decisions. But with all that evidently forgiven – the next game’s already in the works – this is a franchise that has been saved from oblivion not once but twice, and now has a newly promising future and at least one reinvigorated fan.

The One that Proved Me Wrong

Deadly Premonition: The Director’s Cut

Waaaay back in 2010 I wrote a typically Steerpikian (read: long) impressions piece about Deadly Premonition, which I’d intended to go back to and promptly forgot. I was ambivalent, yet I sensed it deserved my time. Later, revisiting Alan Wake, I mocked Deadly Premonition and AJ told me I was a stupid-head.

AJ, I have found, is generally right about stuff. Lord knows she’s right about Deadly Premonition. As she put it:

Deadly Premonition is not so bad it’s good. It’s really, really good.

SWERY65’s wacky disturbotopia combines survival horror and open world inelegantly, but if Deadly Premonition is guilty of anything, it’s assuming more brains and patience than people have. It manipulates players too well – the game itself is an unreliable narrator, as is its protagonist – but once you begin thinking the way it wants you to think, you’ll find yourself in tune with the indigo mixture of ominous and goofy, and the mystery of a ghastly small town murder will begin to consume you.

It’s really the characters, Twin Peaks-ian and beyond bizarre, that make Deadly Premonition work as a game. No one is normal, least of all the FBI agent Francis York Morgan. Typically the protagonist is the normal one injected into a dark carnival of oddities, but York’s actually the main attraction, and like many others his story – which may seem zany at first – is tragic in the extreme, and deeply unsettling.

The Director’s Cut version adds a few new scenes and greatly improves the controls but you’ll do fine with the older version if need be. Deadly Premonition was also released on Steam not long ago, but evidently it makes the Dark Souls port look competent by comparison, so you’d be well-advised to stick with the console versions or invest heavily in valium.

The One I’m Ashamed to Admit

Borderlands 2

Yeah. Look, what can I say? I gave it an honorable mention last year and now it’s clawed its way into the rankings. If story-driven co-op shooters weren’t so thin on the ground, maybe Borderlands 2 wouldn’t be on my list, but the fact is most of the games I played in 2013 were downers and Borderlands 2 was actual fun, like games are sometimes meant to be. You laugh. A lot. And you do it with friends, which means you laugh even more.

It’s silly and dumb and playing it makes me happy. I love my character. My group hates my character. Well, they hate me. They like my character fine, they hate me because I basically am my character. We all are, that’s the magic. Borderlands 2 is a personality mirror. Eric, as Axton the Commando, is a loopy and inappropriately hilarious pummeler of foes whose roaring Sabre Turrets generally mean everything’s going to be all right. Pete is calm and composed as our Siren, phaselocking with sniper precision and characteristically drawn to women with weird hairstyles. McShane is Salvatore the Gunzerker, similarly difficult to knock over and similarly given to rages (because we stop to look around while he cares for nothing but the next quest marker).

Then there’s me.

I’m Gaige, the Mechromancer, a seventeen year old schoolgirl on the run because her anti-bullying robot killed half the science fair. And if it weren’t for the plaid skirt and the deathbot, there’d be little difference between me and Gaige. We’re both self-centered, loot-obsessed, tech-hermit sociopaths. I’m content with that. Statistics will show that my lust for goodies exceeds that of the other three combined. Yes, it’s true that I materialize next to treasure as if by magic and often vacuum away loot right out from under the reaching hands of a teammate. This is wrong but I can’t help myself. Yes, I occasionally cackle maniacally as I unload a clip into something. Yes, I glean more pleasure from electrocuting human beings than is strictly healthy.

But with luck some of my good qualities are also noted. I’m quick to give nice things away. I almost never wander off when a fight is actually happening. I fling myself toward downed allies in a nigh-suicidal frenzy of altruism. But even if none of that is appreciated, it’s okay. My BFF Deathtrap still loves me, to the degree that a murderous robot with laser beam eyes can love. And I know for sure that Gaige will never be bullied again.

The One that Broke My Heart

The Last of Us

In their respective GOTY articles, AJ and Dix made powerful statements about a theme change witnessed in 2013 – the transition of the female from defenseless damsel to deadly daughter. Gaze, so long a staple of cinematic theory, has changed while we weren’t looking. Rescuing princesses is passé, and while it’s just a different form of objectification it is progress of sorts. I can’t think of a single time in a princess-rescuing game that I cared too much about the princess as a human being. The same cannot be said about my feelings for Ellie in The Last of Us, my Game of 2013.

By nature opinions are rarely universal. People define value according to internal gravities, the measure of which is private and often mercurial. One person’s masterpiece is another’s meh. Things as minimally divisive as The Last of Us are quite rare. Certainly some liked it more than others, but opinion is still all on one end of the scale. When was the last time that happened? Shadow of the Colossus?

The Last of Us is one of the most powerful, most subtle, most beautiful games I have ever played. It’s about endings, about the twilight of the human race and small stories that take place in the gloaming hours before humanity vanishes. While cognizant of the complaints about the game, I was never bothered by any of them; I found it to be masterfully designed, and I did not see the ludonarrative dissonance – the implied disconnect between story and game mechanics – that some did. Games are inherently repetitive and abstract and I think The Last of Us, while in no way “realistic,” showed extraordinary ludonarrative connectedness. I acted as Joel more often than I did as Steerpike, and I felt for Ellie as I was meant to by the experience, not by just the script.

The ending left me depressed for days. In the moment before it ended I spoke aloud to my television, something I rarely do: Oh no, I said, don’t end it this way. NO, DON’T END IT THIS WAY! But of course it did.

I still can’t get over Journey, which got the big trophy from me last year. What it did to my soul, The Last of Us did to my heart, and I doubt we’re done discussing it here. I strongly recommend Dix’s review for a more considered opinion of the game, but if you haven’t played The Last of Us, you’re missing out on what might go down in history as gaming’s answer to The English Patient.

Yes, I know those comparisons suck, deal with it.

Special Achievements in 2013

Not everything reaches the coveted Top Five, and sometimes the coveted Top Five are not as coveted as some of the Special Achievements. 2013 was weird in that – like Dix – I’d call it a pretty weak year for gaming, with few AAA standouts and less really memorable stuff than you’d expect. At the same time, though, I struggled with the length of my list this year. Turns out 2013 is really a year of Honorable Mentions. Here are a few that didn’t make the cut, but easily could have.

So Close Award

Metro: Last LightBorderlands 2 beat this because it’s meant more to me personally, and over a longer chunk of the year. But don’t take that to mean 4A’s confident, competent shooter suffers any shortage of excellence. Vastly better than Metro 2033, Last Light is just the beginning of what they’re capable of. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Blind Terror Award

Knock-Knock
The denizens of Ice-Pick Lodge finally produce a solid, unbroken game, but will it be enough? Knock-Knock is like a Maurice Sendak nightmare, and a standout in a year with many notable entries in horror. Whether Ice-Pick Lodge survives to create again I don’t know; I hope they do, but this gem might be too little too late.

Next Year Award

Hate Plus
I just haven’t gotten around to playing Hate Plus yet. I meant to, but I got frustrated because I couldn’t import my Hate Story save and then something distracted me. Given Christine Love’s 100% track record of making Steerpike’s Game of the Year List, we can safely assume that Hate Plus will find its way into the 2014 ranking.

Silent Night

I resemble Harry Potter’s Professor Dumbledore in only one respect: we’re both as predictable as we are difficult to shop for. People get Dumbledore books because he’s Dumbledore. People get me games because… I’m me. Usually when the holiday season rolls around it’s easy to provide folks with a list of games to choose from.

Not this year. This year there was fuck-all to choose from. Industry wonks, particularly journalists with review deadlines and analysts with predictions to make, refer to November and December as “the Holiday Massacre,” because they’re usually so swamped with new titles they can scarcely come up for air. In 2013… nothin’. That’s horrifying.

It may sound like I’m beating a dead horse (it may not – I’m writing this out of order so I have no clue how many times this point has been made), but new consoles came out this year and nobody gave a shit. It’s been ten years, and yet nowhere in the entire record of ho-hummery has a new console generation landed with such a kerplunk. It doesn’t even seem like Sony and Microsoft cared that much. A console generation as seen through the eyes of a teenage girl – not the melodramatic kind, the “whatevs” kind. NEW CONSOLES! #whatevs.

How can a generation year happen and the Big News of the Year NOT be the new consoles? But it’s so.

The new trend is Early Access, which is good for developers in the short term but will be bad for the medium in the long. I could go into detail, but 2014 stretches out before us, and there’s no need to cram every topic into one article. This isn’t Bioshock Infinite after all.

About the author

Tap-Repeatedly Overlord Steerpike is a games industry journalist and consultant. His earliest memories are of video games, and hopes his last memories will be of them as well. He’s a featured monthly columnist with the International Game Developers Association, and is internationally published in an assortment of dull e-Learning texts and less dull gaming publications. He also lectures on games at various universities.

17 Responses to Steerpike’s Games of 2013: Silent Night

Between yours and AJ’s recommendations of Deadly Premonition I picked up the Director’s Cut during the holiday sale. So it’s on the list!

I definitely struggled with what to put on my list because of the lack of real standouts for me. I cheated heavily by naming five runners-up, and even those were personally debated for a while. There were only a few games that made me think Game of the Year, but there were lots that made me think “This game is really good! I would recommend this to people!”

Synonamess Botch01/08/2014

I picked up the Deadly Premonition Director’s Cut during the year-end sales as well (GOG though) since my Xbox 360 is garbage (no I will never tire of trashing it).

Now I’ve really got to start The Last of Us before I accidentally get spoiler-ed.

This year has been a great gaming year for me personally. Dark Souls may have a lot to do with that, but it’s also the year that the PC took back its place as my main platform (although PS3 is still in heavy rotation).

I don’t really have opinions about the new console generation in general (other than my personal one of “I’ve got my PC and Steam. We’re done here.”). Are you basing your statements on your own desire (or lack thereof) to join in, or on your sense of the industry’s response as a whole, or some combination?

Ajax1901/08/2014

I agree that, looking just at what came out in 2013, it was a bit of a down year. I loved “The Last Of Us.” It’s easily my game of the year.

I am not sure how many other games that were actually released in 2013 that I played. Off the top of my head, the only one that comes to mind is “Shadowrun.” I am really not sure if there were any others of note.

I spent a lot of time playing “Civ V” and the before mentioned “Borderlands 2”, and, of late, “Skyrim.” I also played “Hotline Miami” and… I am not sure. The first half of the year was largely a wash due to lack of time.

Oh, and Steerpike is not exaggerating about his love of loot in “Borderlands 2.” In our first play through (we’re currently on our third play through, mainly for the DLC), there were only three of us. The statistics showed an insane imbalance in the amount of loot Steerpike got as compared to his two companions. It was like a 5 to one ration with the other two people combined. The man has a nose for the loot. He is also generous with the loots. Every time he cries out, “Pete! I have something for you!” and we go to trade, I end up getting, like, four things. I always have a blast playing that game with my friends.

I need to play “Tomb Raider.” I hate platformers, but the rest sounds great. I am terrible at jumping puzzles. I struggle with very simple jumps or just climbing ladders in FPS games.

Max "xtal" Boone01/09/2014

I don’t think there’s any denying that the new consoles sold well, they obviously did. It’s that there’s no reason to own one right now. For most people there won’t be until Titanfall, but even then that’s supposed to come to PC, right?

Combine that with the Watch Dogs delay which was easily the most anticipated “next-gen” game, and that Dark Souls 2 is a PS3 game and everyone who is alive should play exclusively that game for at least 24 months after its release, I see no reason to own a PS4 or Xbone until 2016.

Or whenever The Last Guardian is revealed as a PS4 exclusive; whichever comes first.

My feeling about the console launch being blah is essentially personal, maybe I don’t watch enough TV or something but it seems like there wasn’t the usual frenzy of ads and coverage that typically accompanies a console launch.

I also don’t see the point in them. I mean, from a business perspective yeah (ie, we want to sell a new object), but both the 360 and PS3 still have life in them and the technological advances haven’t yet been much of a differentiator. The Bone is WAY more powerful than the 360, same with PS4/PS3, in terms of gigahertzes and occlusions and megabytes, but how much of that have we seen? So little that neither company even used the power of the new consoles as a big selling point.

When was the last time a new console launched that they didn’t make an insane hubub about how much more powerful the graphics were? Never before. This time around it’s really hard for non-technical people, like fratboy gamers, to understand how much more is going on under the hood. And both MS and Sony made it worse by shipping the vast majority of big games for both platforms, which means that the current crop of next-gen games are designed for the previous generation and they look it.

Mostly I think it’s from Eurogamer. We’d been in line for some time to get into the PS4 area, and each played a few games, and I so vividly remember me and Gregg standing there watching Mat play Knack, and we just couldn’t see enough difference to justify the console’s existence. Sure, WE recognized that Knack wouldn’t have been possible on PS3, but the reasons would be invisible to most normal humans.

Also, I must defend myself against Ajax19’s vicious slander. There’s no way my loot count is FIVE to one. It is, at most, 4.6 to 1. Probably closer to 4.4 or so. They’ve all banded together against me! Every scrap of loot is hard-won now that they know what to look for. It’s not my fault! Loot just sort of seems to fall near me.

And it’s not like I don’t pull my weight fighting-wise. Well. Deathtrap pulls my weight. But that’s basically the same thing. I have a killer robot. They have no killer robot. When we fight something they actually have to do their own fighting. I just deploy my killer robot, which – and again, can I be blamed for this? – which carries out my burden of responsibility effectively enough that I am freed to pursue the leisure activity of my choice.

Which is looking for loot.

Synonamess Botch01/10/2014

Of course sharper visuals are the obvious choice for marketers looking to differentiate their products. The difference this time around is just not significant enough to completely hang your ad campaign on. So basically I’m agreeing with you, but also in the sense that it’s personal for me too. Whatever the hype may be I’m unaware of it and not really interested. But again, a large part of that is because of the revival of PC gaming (and the fact that Dark Souls 2 is on PS3).

I’m always a late adopter anyway, so my opinion about the new consoles is not really relevant. But not only do I plan to wait, I plan to not buy them at all.

I picked up Borderlands 2 via PS+ and played around with it a bit. Is it just me or do the visuals seem really…busy? The physics seem really jumpy/jerky too. I wish it were third-person.

I think this console generation is going to be slow to take off, personally, because it’s harder to sell people on needing the new one if they don’t want the non-game stuff. As always, I’m waiting on system exclusives that I just can’t miss.

I think, oddly, the people who know enough about what the new systems can do that the old ones can’t are also the people who know enough to not be that excited about them yet, at least as something to go buy. A hardcore gamer who knows upcoming releases and things will be able to eyeball the game libraries and decide there’s nothing critical there, especially when they can just get most of them on a different platform right now. I think it is in many ways the “fratboy gamers” who don’t have this knowledge who will be the earlier adopters because of a “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality.

I picked up Knock-knock over Christmas. Looking forward to playing that one!

Gregg B01/15/2014

Oh man, I’m still reading the list but had to comment first: Bioshock ad Nauseam and that entire paragraph is pure gold.

Gregg B01/15/2014

I’m amazed how many of you thought this was a weak year! 😮 I know my list features a fair few non-2013 games but given how behind the curve I usually am and how many prominent 2013 releases I didn’t get to play (mentioned in the comments) I think I would have found it very difficult to keep my list down to 5 or so 2013 entries!

You only need to look at how different our lists are to realise that there’s been a great spread of games this year and I think that’s a lot more interesting and healthier to see than a largely identical bunch.

Steerpike, what was Tomb Raider’s budget and how much has it grossed so far? If you know?

Helmut01/15/2014

I haven’t found any direct quotes, except a Square-Enix financial statement written in a language I couldn’t read. The quotes I did find indicated they have reached the 4 million mark in sales of TR, and in a different statement said that they were disappointed with sales of 3.5 million units saying that games with a $100 million budget required 5-10 million unit sales to be profitable. So, in an order of magnitude sort of way, I’d guess it cost somewhere around 100-150 million and that they’re not quite happy with the results.

Max "xtal" Boone01/17/2014

Tomb Raider was indeed a “failure” which is ludicrous. Jim Sterling covered this very topic in one of his Jimquisition videos, in which he compared the poor budgeting of Tomb Raider to the responsible and level headed budgeting of Dark Souls, where that 1.5 million (or so) sales game was a big success. Dark Souls II will probably be a “failure” on the other hand due to lifted expectations!

I’ve heard various figures, but the most absurd by far is also well within the realm of publisher executives and their self-deceptive expectations. Cynically, it’s even the one I’m inclined to accept was at least the tacit view among Square-Enix brass – namely that they saw Tomb Raider moving four million units in week zero, six million by June and eight million by Christmas. Unless it was Call of Duty: Tomb Raider, the chances of that happening were always zero.

4.5M is a great number, a major hit really, assuming it’s planned, budgeted, scheduled, marketed, and managed with that number in mind. This is where Jim Sterling really gets shouty in the video Xtal mentions. Dark Souls is comparable to TR13 in enough ways that his point is valid: that game was a massive success at 2M because From Software controlled the project. Square and Crystal didn’t control Tomb Raider; they chose to build a new engine from scratch, they invested enormously in unnecessary art assets, spent millions in marketing, and thus needed untenable numbers to break even.

Where both games really match is franchising. The next Tomb Raider will do better based on this one, while Dark Souls 2 will probably sell two million in a month based on its predecessor. But Square/Crystal could have made exactly the same game for less than half the budget and nobody would have been the wiser. It was bad business and bad management.

Yikes, so I didn’t listen to the bit about the PC port of Deadly Premonition being so terrible, or I did and I thought, how bad could it be? And then one day probably during a sale it was like $3 or something ridiculous on Steam and…

And…

It is really, really bad. So bad it’s bad. Like…I played BioShock Infinite on this computer, amongst other things. And I’m pretty sure I’m getting like 15 fps in Deadly Premonition. Not to mention it’s windowed and you can’t make it fullscreen. Not to mention mouselook is really unresponsive and there isn’t any controller support.

It’s totally worth it, Dix, and you should be able to get your hands on a PS3 copy affordably these days.

However, if you’re feeling adventurous, there’s a Deadly Premonition de-sucking patch from the same fellow who gave us DSFix for the Dark Souls port. Don’t know how well it works, but I read some of the NeoGaf thread and it sounds like he was able to fix a number of issues. Give that a try.

My friendly neighborhood GameStop had a used PS3 copy, so I booted that up last night and – lo and behold – the game actually works! As in, runs at a reasonable framerate, has controls that respond when I do something…sure, it would be an ugly PS2 game, and the combat is not good, but it functions.

I’ve only played maybe the first hour – the bit where you turn on all the generators and shoot ghosts and shit – and don’t have any particular thoughts either way on it. But it functions.